The Urbanization of the British Shopping Mall As the West Goes East

Jewell N. Bringing it Back Home: The Urbanization of the British Shopping Mall as the West Goes East. ARENA Journal of Architectural Research. 2016; 1(1): 2. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/ajar.4 HUMANITIES ESSAY Bringing it Back Home: The Urbanization of the British Shopping Mall as the West Goes East Nicholas Jewell* The objective of this research is the formation of a critical position by which the repositioning of the British shopping mall from a suburban to an urban situation can be understood. Widely discredited as the ‘slayer’ of the high street, the suburban shopping mall has been cast aside as western development ideals shift toward a new so-called ‘urban renaissance’. Accordingly, many architects have focused their interest on Far Eastern models of urban complexity drawn from the unprecedented urban expansion taking place in countries such as China, Singapore and Japan. There, the shopping mall has become a cornerstone of a new urbanity, representing a typological leap from the historic suburban models of mall design established in much of the Western world. Using Westfield in White City, the Westfield development at the 2012 Olympic site, the Liverpool One shopping centre and the redeveloped Bull Ring in Birmingham as UK case studies, I will draw attention to how the typology is evolving as a culturally hybrid proposition borne of insights drawn from its Eastern counterparts. Can this blurring of cultural lines unravel the layers of existential meaning embodied within the modern British mall to provide a different kind of language with which designers may engage with this building type? Timely questions such as this must be addressed as the ‘second coming’ of the shopping mall, re-branded under the banner of ‘urban regeneration’, increasingly defines what happens in the centre of British cities today. Keywords: Shopping Mall; China; Urban Regeneration; Suburbia; Cultural Hybridity; Architecture Introduction Over its brief life architects have struggled with the shopping mall. Its classic suburban form, pioneered in post-war America, was seemingly a guarantor of financial success that locked the typology into a stasis of non-evolution [1–3]. As a convenient lifestyle choice that concentrated desirable elements of consumption within a single protective environment, the ‘classic’ American mall offered itself as an alternative to the city centre. Moreover, this choice was coupled to perceptions of the motor car as a symbol of suburban freedom. Validation of the suburban mall was derived in opposition to the congestion, confusion and threat implicit within the traditional urban core. Theoretically the shopping mall offered the convenience, comfort and security that the urban realm could not. If the shopping mall thrived by removing the perceived threat of the urban realm, however, it also impinged upon its freedoms. Victor Gruen’s major book ‘Shopping Towns USA’ [1], published in 1960, served as the benchmark for shopping mall design. Many of Gruen’s innovations remain prevalent today. The most fundamental of these was a devastatingly simple plan form christened the ‘dumb-bell’ [1–3]. It consisted of a single internal shopping street with two large ‘anchor stores’ acting as ‘magnets’ at either end of the route, achieving a balance between plan and profit that has underscored the shopping mall’s physical form ever since. Spatial formulas such as the dumb-bell served to manipulate the movements of the consumer. Predictability was as much about the replication of profit as it was about guarantees of an anxiety free experience. To obfuscate the mass-produced spatial template at their heart, many shopping malls distinguished themselves by branding * Ben Adams Architects, GB, [email protected] 2 Bringing it Back Home their internalized worlds with fantastical architectural imagery culled from the globe to create an immersive surface language that heightened the experience of consumption [3, p.329–335]. Tailored to the tastes and preferences of a target demographic the surface architecture of the mall, and hence its identity, acted ‘as a cultural sponge, soaking up and morphing to its surroundings.’ [4, p.17] Architectural language thus became a signifier of class boundaries and safety with one’s own kind, reinforcing the mall interior as a privileged domain of consumption. This insular, diagram-led approach to shopping mall design became a byword for suburban ‘placelessness’ [5]. For many architects the shopping mall was seen as an inferior building typology and the preserve of commercially driven ‘lesser’ designers whose work was at odds with architecture’s quasi-socialist agenda of good intentions [6, p.7; 7, p.37]. As the typology gained popularity globally, its limitations became all too apparent. Its putative safety and convenience found traction with a growing consumer base that adopted its amenity in preference to the traditional urban core with which it competed. The presence of a suburban shopping mall became a major factor in the decline of traditional urban centres during the second half of the twentieth century. Furthermore, the seemingly guaranteed success of the typological formula led to overdevelopment. An overabundance of competing shopping malls led to real-estate failures and the well-documented phenomena of ‘dead-malls’ that is fetishized by many urban geographers today [8]. Finally there were the problems inherent in the surface architecture of the shopping mall itself. As a form of architectural ‘branding’ the mall’s surface language faced huge difficulties once it was rendered static by the invariance of built form [3, p.329–335]. While branded imagery differentiated a given mall within a sea of otherwise identical alternatives, the immersive novelty of its surface dressing would be eclipsed by next season’s fashion. An architecture based on such a whimsical premise was left wanting when the fickle winds of consumer taste changed direction. Accordingly, moves were made on both sides of the Atlantic to reverse the blight for which the shopping mall was considered responsible. Now widely discredited as the ‘slayer’ of the high street, construction of suburban shopping malls ceased as western development ideals shifted towards a so-called ‘urban renaissance’. But if this scenario appeared to spell the end of a brief, inglorious life for the shopping mall typology in the Western world, its materialization in burgeoning East Asian economies pointed towards something altogether different. Here, the shopping mall has been at the forefront of the massive urban expansion that has gripped Asia in recent decades. How and where the shopping mall was first adopted in this context does not have the clearest answer. Rem Koolhaas, however, identified the significance of the mall’s arrival in Singapore [9]. Here, a fusion of Le Corbusier’s ‘City of Tomorrow’ [10] and Metabolist [11] experiments with new models of urban density (such as collective or mega forms) found organisational clarity in the shopping mall atrium. Delivery of a pedestrian realm that offered respite from Singapore’s stifling subtropical heat while segregating differing modes of infrastructure, in the manner of Le Corbusier’s machine city, placed an emphasis on the manipulation of the city section. The multi-level shopping mall atrium became an urban nucleus. It provided a comfortably habitable public realm, and efficiently combined horizontal and vertical movement patterns to process the multi-layered infrastructure of the machine city. Vehicular traffic arrived at ground level while pedestrian links were facilitated primarily at first floor level. At no point did these differing modes and scales of trans- port mix. Above, and connected to the atrium, sat residential accommodation and offices. The atrium itself became the favoured realm for social interaction and shopping defined the blueprint of what social life might be in this urban enclave. Movement here was based less on the vectoral figure-ground dynamic of the aforementioned ‘dumb-bell’ and instead took on a centripetal quality revolving around the mall’s open atrium (Fig. 1). A perpetual, three-dimensional circuit of motion was established. This, in turn, established a series of ‘grounds’ independ- ent of city grade, which enhanced the internalised logic of the shopping mall form [12, p.47–55]. In clearly defining a set of internalised limits, the mall was able to parcel a branded chunk of pseudo-public city space. The cut, however, was literal. Mirroring the Western model of the out-of-town shopping mall, the external city was fanatically excluded. The interior order of the shopping mall now offered an alternative to the heat and exterior chaos of Singapore’s machine city rather than the hostile asphalt of a perimeter car park. Singapore was, of course, not the only site in Asia where hybridization of the shopping mall typology took place. Ideas of forging of new ground take on quite literal meaning when transplanted to another locus of experimentation: Hong Kong. Here the challenging topography of the Peak defines ‘grade’ for much of the island. Accordingly the shopping mall is employed to create a flat pedestrian realm that tames its natural environs to form a network of consumption over the island’s city section (Fig. 2). As a consequence it is possible to navigate huge swathes of Hong Kong Island without going outside at all. The key is the manipulation of the shopping mall’s vertical dimension. This efficiently exploits the extended programme Jewell 3 Figure 1: Mall atrium at Golden Mile, Singapore (Photograph: Nicholas Jewell). Figure 2: High level walkway between shopping malls, Hong Kong (Photograph: Nicholas Jewell). of mixed-usage patterns contained within the ‘bounded-city-block’ typology. While each corner of the mall infers horizontal continuity it also functions as a vertical tether. Corners become complex three-dimensional junctions – filters that inform and activate the first set of choices that visitors must make as they exit the mono-functional enclave of the office or the metro.

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